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Jack Kerouac

News about Jack Kerouac, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Jack Kerouac, the novelist who named the Beat Generation and exuberantly celebrated its rejection of middle-class American conventions, died on October 21, 1969, in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hospital. He was 47 years old.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time," he wrote in "On the Road," a novel he completed in only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published.

When it finally appeared in 1957, it immediately became a basic text for youth who found their country claustrophobic and oppressive. At the same time, it was a spontaneous and passionate celebration of the country itself, of "the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent."

Mr. Kerouac's admirers regarded him as a major literary innovator and something of a religious seer, but this estimate of his achievement never gained wide acceptance among literary tastemakers.

The Beat Generation, originally regarded as a bizarre bohemian phenomenon confined to small coteries in San Francisco and New York, spilled over into the general culture in the nineteen-sixties. But as it became fashionable to be beat, it became less fashionable to read Jack Kerouac.

His subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible by threading a hefty roll of tele-type paper into his typewriter and setting down his story on one continuous sheet. What resulted he would later transcribe for forwarding to his publisher, but never revise, in principle he regarded revision as a form of lying.

Truman Capote called Mr. Kerouac's method of composition typing, not writing. But Allen Ginsberg, who regarded his friend as the greatest American poet of his time, declared that Mr. Kerouac had created "a spontaneous bop prosody."--Adapted from "Jack Kerouac, Novelist, Dead; Father of the Beat Generation; Author of 'On the Road' Was Hero to Youth-Rejected Middle-Class Values," by Joseph Lelyveld and originally published in the New York Times on Oct. 22, 1969.